Question

Is CodeIgniter suited to building high traffic sites ? Are there any examples of such sites ?
I’ve used CI for a personal site and I liked it but I’ve read conflicting news on whether it can handle sites with lots of traffic.

I’m not really looking for other frameworks that can probably do the job better though if there is something that is really really good, I’d like to know.

Answer 1

CodeIgniter is one of the fastest frameworks but the only thing that it means is that if the same programmer uses CodeIgniter and, for example, ZendFramework and if the code is approximately similar for both of them, the application will probably be faster with CI. But it doesn’t mean that CI will help someone build better architecture, so the developer can be either the slowest or fastest part of any framework.

I agree with pestaa that database optimization is one of the most critical things to do. Read about indexes, MySQL performance (if you’re going to use MySQL), best practices and so on.

Another thing to consider is caching. CI caching is bad so use third-party caching libraries. There is a lot of information on CI forum on this topic and you should choose which library is better for you.

Also, read about lazy load. Try to load only necessary information (images, texts and so on) and, in some cases, it will help you improve performance.

If you’re going to implement a full-text search, don’t use MySQL for this purpose, because such operators as LIKE and MATCHES are pretty slow. Instead, I recommend using something like Sphinx Search or other search engines. I recommend Sphinx because it’s fast and flexible, it has great documentation, the new version supports real-time indexing, integration with MySQL (SphinxSE) and it also supports MySQL binary protocol (look for SphinxQL if interested). It will take some time to get started and become familiar with Sphinx but the more you work with this engine, the more amazed you’ll be. This engine is used by ThePirateBay and other big projects so it’s suitable for high traffic websites.

Cogear is a great CMS which is based on a slightly modified CodeIgniter framework (it supports HMVC and some other types of plugins). Developers swear that it has much better performance than WordPress (which sometimes serves pretty popular websites and blogs). Unfortunately, their website is exclusively in Russian.

CI is ok but if you want an alternative, I recommend you to give a try to Yii framework. It’s a fast and powerful PHP framework with a lot of amazing features.

Good luck!